LITMIR.BIZ

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matter-of-factly,

      ‘She can’t, not where we put it.’

      ‘Do you think she’ll know we’ve done it?’Peter demanded. ‘Do you think she’ll tell Aunt Maud?’

      ‘No,’ Helen assured him, ‘but later on, when she realises that we intend to make her leave, then she’ll know we did it,’she added with relish.

      ‘But she isn’t like the others,’ Peter told his sister. ‘She’s our cousin.’

      ‘Our second cousin,’Helen contradicted flatly. ‘And you know what’ll happen if she stays. She’ll just be like all the others, mooning about after Uncle Frazer, and then, if he gets interested in her and marries her and they have children of their own, what’s going to happen to us?’

      All the anger and disbelief Rebecca had been experiencing as she listened to the twins plotting vanished abruptly as she heard the fear and loneliness behind those last words. What was going to happen to them indeed? By all accounts Rory and Lilian’s marriage was not a happy one. The reason that Lillian had agreed to accompany Rory on this Hong Kong contract in the first place, according to what Rebecca’s mother had confided to her, was that she felt it necessary to keep an eye on her errant husband.

      Since the children were not allowed to go with them, it had been necessary to find somebody else to take charge of them. Frazer, of course, had been the natural choice.

      Having herself been the child of parents who of necessity had had to spend long periods of time out of the country, her father before he had retired having been a diplomat, Rebecca was very familiar with the attacks of isolation and loneliness that could hit children separated from their parents for long periods of time. That was one of the reasons she made such a good teacher, or so her head had told her. She readily understood the fears and anxieties of those children who actually boarded at the school and seemed to have the knack of being able to soothe and comfort them. However, while she and Robert had had parents who had been absent for long periods during their childhood, they had never for one moment doubted their parents’ love and concern for them.

      Helen and Peter, it seemed, did, and perhaps with good reason, she acknowledged uneasily. It was no secret in the family that Lillian had been annoyed when she’d discovered that she was pregnant a matter of months after she and Rory were married.

      She had been twenty, Rory twenty-two—two spoiled and self-indulgent young people who had married on a whim and conceived the twins without a moment’s thought for the future responsibilities they would bring.

      Rory had always been lightweight compared with Frazer, eager to taste every one of life’s pleasures, self-indulgent to the extreme. Fun to be with if fun was all one wanted from life, but with no substance to fall back on for life’s difficult and unhappy times.

      ‘If Frazer gets married, his new wife won’t want us living at Aysgarth. Everyone says that,’ Helen reminded her brother. ‘That means we’ll have to go away to boarding school or go and live with Gran and Gramps in Brighton.’

      ‘Perhaps Mum and Dad might come back and Dad will get a job here in England,’ Peter suggested hopefully, but Helen quelled his suggestion with a stern frown.

      ‘You know he won’t,’ she told her brother. ‘We heard them arguing about it last Christmas, don’t you remember? Mum said she’d leave Dad if it wasn’t for us. Anyway, I don’t want them to come back, because they’re always quarrelling and arguing. I want to stay here at Aysgarth with Frazer.’

      Their voices faded as they made their way along the path away from her, and Rebecca felt her heart turn over with pity and compassion for them. Adults forgot how much children saw and heard and felt. Only when she was sure they were safely out of sight and earshot did she make her own way back to her car.

      The lane from here to Aysgarth was straight, apart from one particularly bad bend about fifty yards away. Thoughtfully she left her car where it was and walked towards it. As she had suspected, as she rounded the bend, she saw on the road in front of her some dangerously sharp shards of glass which, had she driven over them, must surely have severely damaged if not completely destroyed her tyres.

      What neither of the twins could possibly know was that eighteen months before their birth, a very severe accident had been caused on this very bend by broken glass, though not left deliberately in that instance. A bottle which had fallen accidentally from a crate and not been noticed had broken on the road and the young couple in the car had been killed when their tyres had punctured and the car had swerved out of control off the road, plunging down into the valley, where it had burst into flames.

      Rebecca was far too sensible and knew far too much about children of the twins’ age to imagine for a moment that they had thought far enough ahead to realise the possible outcome of their plans to get rid of her. Death, if they thought about it at all, was to children of that age a concept outside their grasp, unless they were unfortunate enough to suffer the loss of someone close to them.

      As she picked up the glass and carefully put it in her handkerchief, carrying it back to the car with her, she pondered on how best to deal with the problem facing her.

      All her desire to return to London was now gone. The twins needed her help, even if they themselves did not recognise it.

      She got back into her car in a very thoughtful frame of mind indeed. The twins might not be able to recognise their need, but others might. The Great-Aunt Maud she remembered, despite her assumed vagueness and love of drama, had possessed more than her fair share of her nephew’s astuteness. Could it be that Maud had summoned her, not so much because she needed help in keeping the twins under control, but because she saw that they needed something more than mere discipline, and perhaps because she was hoping that, given the similarity of their childhood, Rebecca might be able to reach out and give the twins the reassurance and love they so obviously needed.

      She was still turning these thoughts over in her mind as she drove in past the gates to Aysgarth. The house had been built by a Victorian Aysgarth who had made his money from the boom in railways and promptly retired to Cumbria with his wife and family.

      It was a large, square building, more sturdy than elegant, three storeys high with deep, ample cellars. The sturdy Victorian furniture had been retained by the various generations of Aysgarths to inhabit the house, so that the rooms possessed an air of solid comfort rather than fashionable luxury.

      It was a house in which one instantly felt at home, or at least that had always been Rebecca’s impression of it as a child. As she drove past the front door to park her car, she saw that the back door was standing open.

      Aysgarth was remote enough for its inhabitants not to need to worry about the intentions of any passing caller, and as Rebecca got out of the car she heard a familiar shrill barking and kneeled down just in time to wad off the ecstatic welcome of a spaniel of rather large size and dubious parentage.

      The best thing that could probably be said about Sophy was that she was extremely affectionate, the worst that she was also extremely scatty. As an adult Rebecca had always been rather surprised that Frazer of all people, so meticulous, so hard-edged and determined about everything he did, should actually have given house room to this overexuberant little stray who had wandered into the grounds of Aysgarth House a few weeks before Rebecca’s own eighteenth birthday. She had been the one who had found her and who had taken her into the house, bundling her shivering, soaking form in a towel and rubbing her dry till she stopped shivering.

      She had pleaded with Norty to be allowed to keep the dog until Frazer came back from the Institute. In those days he had not headed the impressive and very important scientific institute whose work was always shrouded in so much secrecy, but he had still worked hard with very long hours, and it had been almost nine o’clock that evening before he had put her mind at rest and announced that yes, she could keep the stray, providing no one turned up to claim it.

      Within twenty-four hours of being in the household, Sophy had firmly and determinedly attached herself to Frazer, becoming not her dog, but Frazer’s. However, it seemed she had remembered her, Rebecca reflected as she

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